🔴 Breaking: Is Italy the Model for Europe’s Future

Is Italy the Model for Europe’s Future?

Over more than a quarter-century, I’ve watched Europe’s politics become more like Italy’s, with all the resulting instability, as the far right came in from the cold.

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.The Italianization of EuropeOver more than a quarter-century, I’ve watched Europe’s politics become more like Italy’s, with all the resulting instability, as the far right came in from the cold.Supporters of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party at a rally in Rome before general elections in 2023.

Her victory was the first for a party with post-fascist roots since Mussolini.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesNov. 15, 2026, 12:01 a.m.

ETWhen I first moved to Rome, I spent my time living in the past.At the turn of the century, I drifted through a vintage postcard of postwar Italy: old women sitting around tables they had dragged into the street, old men playing cards in caps, cats arching their backs on the hoods of snub-nosed Fiats.As newspapers filled with talk of Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul with ambitions and appetites worthy of a Roman emperor, my meanderings inevitably took me toward Tiber Island, a sliver of land in the middle of the river that divides Rome.An ancient bridge on the island’s left bank had a strange statue of weather-beaten faces positioned back-to-back as if they couldn’t stand one another. The heads rose out of the shared torso of a square pillar and represented Janus, Rome’s god of the past and future, the deity of transitions and change.Back then, I didn’t see the change around me, but now, more than a quarter-century later, after spending decades reporting on Italian politics and changes across Europe, I have come to understand that I was living in the future.ImageA billboard featuring Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party in Rome in 1994.Credit...Franco Origlia/Getty ImagesIn the time since, I have seen an Italianization of politics all around the continent, with coalitions of small parties resulting in instability, with fed-up voters desperate for new saviors.

But more than anything, I have seen — in Britain, France, Germany — countries following the Italian model by allowing the far right into the political mainstream.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?